


Contrary to the Biological Facts

by YesBothWays



Series: The Body's Intelligence Could Rival The Mind's [15]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Nerdy af, Trans Character, dialogue about gender and sexuality, intellectual chemistry, physical chemistry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 09:34:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9228950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesBothWays/pseuds/YesBothWays
Summary: About a year later, I got it!  I hope folks might still want to see some more of Cosima and Delphine's love.  Basically, this story two love scenes between Cosima and Delphine with a hangout in the middle between four wlw's trying to talk through complex ideas and experiences of gender and sexuality. This story was meant to be a continuation of "Love Never Leaves," but I got stuck on the introduction of Shay's new girlfriend, Ashley, who is a trans woman, and this long dialogue about gender and sexuality.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Leo (graduallybecomingmyself on tumblr) and Henrietta (acid-at-work on tumblr)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Leo+%28graduallybecomingmyself+on+tumblr%29+and+Henrietta+%28acid-at-work+on+tumblr%29).



> Thanks to evolutionarydevelopment and darkplayer14-blog on tumblr for help with the French!

            When they returned home that afternoon, Delphine and Cosima spent a long moment inside their door untying their boots and dragging off outer layers. The house felt quiet and cool after they were so long away. Cosima took a couple of steps into the living room, clearly deciding what to do next. Delphine had a sense that Cosima had some kind of wild energy still simmering under the surface. Cosima pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it on the back of the couch. She kept getting undressed, and Delphine stood up and watched, unable to hold another thought in her mind for a moment while watching Cosima taking off her clothes. Cosima turned to Delphine with a grin, bit the tip of her tongue for a second, raised her eyebrows, and simply darted up the stairs towards the shower.

            Delphine needed only half a moment for instinct to kick in. She charged up the stairs after Cosima. Cosima had the water running and was already laughing at the sound of Delphine’s urgent approach from beyond the halfway closed door, when Delphine opened the door and closed it behind her. Cosima turned and put her arms out to Delphine, even as Delphine came in, got her in an embrace, and began kissing her. She pulled off the rest of Cosima’s clothes, as they kissed with increasing depth and passion between them. They had both been cold for so long, their skin felt a strange mix of numb and sensitized.

            Once they were both naked, Delphine pulled Cosima fully into an embrace that stretched her body out right up against her own. The familiar lines of Cosima’s body made her hands almost quake when she touched them. They felt new to her even still. She guided them both into the shower, steam from the hot water billowing out as she opened the door. Inside the shower, Cosima got her into an embrace right away, so they could continue kissing. Cosima made the softest moan, as Delphine held her hand under her dreads at the base of her skull. Their kisses became tender and searching. And Delphine let her hands run down over Cosima’s body along with the running water. She looked at Cosima’s eyes, how soft and dark they were, and found herself looking at Cosima with the felt sense that she was witnessing her from some new angle and seeing anew how vast she truly was. She held Cosima’s face in her hands and kissed her with a deep and focused passion.

            “Je te vois comme un monde entier que j’ai encore à explorer,” Delphine said to her, words that meant, “You still seem to me like you are an entire world I’ve yet to discover.”  

            Cosima smiled slowly and closed her eyes as she did. She let the words wash over her, loving every moment between them when Delphine felt compelled to speak to her in French.

            “Viens me trouver,” Cosima said back to her, which meant, “Come and find me.”

            “I will,” Delphine said and felt the most profound dedication. “Every part.”

            “Je t’aime,” Cosima told Delphine.

            Those familiar words spoken in her own native tongue nearly made Delphine’s knees feel weak. She dragged Cosima up against herself again, and they kissed for ages in the shower, lost in the sensation of being with one another. At rare times such as this, their kissing felt like an act of love making in and of itself. They kept on, and Delphine felt Cosima’s breath shake and knew her own hands must be trembling under the rush of the water. With a ribbon of unfocused thought, Delphine remembered how once a wonderful gay man she worked with had come to work distraught over a sociological study that showed that how often couples had sex correlated to how many men there were in the couple, so gay men had the most sex, straight couples less, and women the least. He felt depressed that this said something about the innate differences in the sexes. Delphine had laughed at the weak study. With a wave of her hand in dismissal she had said that women knew a hundred ways to make love and could turn almost anything into profound experiences of passion and connection. She remembered how his shoulders had straightened, and he brought this up with her several more times that day, bolstered and intrigued by the idea. Only with Cosima had she found this out to be truth. Even though they had sex as often as anyone she could imagine, there were times like this one that did not fit any definition and yet left her altered in ways more profound than even the best sex she had before they met.

            They took a long time. And they got dressed quickly in the cooler air outside of the bathroom. Cosima climbed up to sit on the counter by the sink as she did her eye makeup over. Delphine fixed her hair in the mirror beside her.

            “What should we do with our day?” Cosima said with a grin accompanied by a playful readjustment of her body.

            “Why don’t we call Shay and Ashley to see if they want to come over for dinner?” Delphine answered.

            Cosima was pleased by this idea, she could feel. When they came downstairs, Delphine came around to sit on the couch, as Cosima slipped over the back of it while getting her phone out and getting a call going. Delphine gathered her long legs up onto the couch. She reached to pull Cosima’s legs out straighter, as she settled in, and kept her hands on Cosima’s legs feeling the smooth fabric of the heavy tights she wore under her dress. From the conversation between Cosima and Shay, Delphine could tell Ashley was already there with Shay, and then that they were going to come over. Delphine reached for the phone when it got to the part where they would decide what to cook. She and Shay made a plan together easily.

            “Is Ashley bringing Cody?” Cosima asked.  

            Ashley had a dog, named Cody, a black lab mixed with a lot of who-knew-what-else to make him speckled and proportionally unique, as Delphine had once called him. He had a great temperament and was possibly the most contented dog Delphine had ever met. He and Cosima were more or less mutually obsessed with one another. Cosima wanted her question passed through Delphine to Shay to Ashley, and Delphine took too long, and Cosima asked again with a press at her glasses, too eager to wait.

            “Is Cody coming?” Delphine asked to appease her, then said to Cosima, “Yes.”

            Cosima grinned and raised her arms in triumph over this. Cosima was still smiling and leaning into the arm of the couch with her arms over her head when Delphine hung up the phone. She was already pleased, and no one was coming over for a couple of hours yet. Already their day had been so full of love, Delphine felt herself saturated by the feel of it and knew she would be processing it for days. And Cosima only wanted more. She could hold any amount of love in her body, Delphine thought, and imagined that Cosima stretched herself out now to make space inside to let all of it in.

            They spent the hours before their friends came to be with them on the couch together, gathering tea and books to the coffee table. They shared a pair of blankets between them haphazardly, and Delphine dragged the covers back onto the couch whenever they almost fell. Shay texted when they were heading over. So they were already expecting them when a knock came on the door.

            Delphine and Cosima both got up to greet them. Shay and Ashley let Cody go in first, and Cosima leaned down to get her hands on his ruff. He was already so excited to be visiting their familiar home, and when he saw Cosima, he became nearly as wild as she was. Shay managed to hand Cosima his leash in the flurry, and they were practically rolling on the front carpet together in seconds. They acted as if they had been apart for months, when it had been only a handful of days.

            “He’s wet,” Ashley said to Cosima with a grimace.

            Cosima grabbed a blanket from the couch and started roughing him all over with it to dry him off, as if that was what Ashley had meant. This turned into a rough game of him biting the blanket, and Delphine wondered if the blanket would be a loss before the end. Ashley laughed a little and shook her head at them. She turned to Delphine and said hello.

            Ashley hugged Delphine, as Delphine put a hand in the small of Ashley’s back to draw her close and kissed both of her cheeks high on her cheekbones. Ashley was used to this gesture and turned her face a bit with it. They were both tall enough, Delphine had to tip her chin up. Delphine then took Shay’s face in her hands in a more intimate gesture and kissed both of her cheeks, as well. They embraced a moment.   Cosima got up off the floor, and she and Shay wrapped their arms around one another comfortably and rocked back and forth for a long moment. Cosima came towards Ashley at a shy, crooked angle and sort of snuck into a gentle hug with her.

            “Hey!” Cosima said.

            “We brought wood,” Ashley said and grabbed a wrapped parcel of firewood from outside the doorway.

            “Just what four queer woman need,” Shay murmured, as she took off her coat.

            Everyone laughed once the joke settled on them. Delphine and Shay launched into the familiar process of making dinner together. Ashley knelt before the fireplace and concentrated on getting a fire going. Cosima got a brush and a rope toy out from a drawer in the living room. She had bought these specifically for Cody’s visits to their house like any truly dedicated aunt. The two of them rough housed on the front carpet until they were both winded. Then Cosima brushed out his damp coat while he sank more and more to lie flat on his side and squinted his eyes in pleasure.

            Cosima noticed Ashley watching her thoughtfully with a gentle smile. She wondered if Ashley were thinking about Cosima being a clone, since she had only learned this the last time they were all together. The catalyst for the revealing of this had come a couple weeks before, when they were all together at Shay’s apartment. Ashley had brought a little bit of her own stuff to Shay’s apartment, and Delphine found a picture she thought for a moment was Ashley’s brother in a dress uniform. She looked more closely and became more intuitive in her thoughts, and Ashley noticed her looking at the picture and came over to her.

            “Is this you?” Delphine asked.

            “Yeah,” Ashley said. “I grew up as a guy. I’m trans.”

            Delphine commented on all her decorations before putting the picture back down. She did not think much about it the rest of that night. She thought to mention it to Cosima the next morning over breakfast.

            “Did you know that Ashley is trans?” Delphine said.

            Cosima squinted her eyes and pursed her lips in a very particular face of concentration. She was still sleepy from the night before and probably a tad hung over. She rocked her head to and fro a little to convey wishy-washiness in her answer.

            “I… guess… maybe,” Cosima said.

            “Seriously?” Delphine said.

            “From just like ways that Shay would avoid talking about certain stuff, and I don’t know, subtle… queer stuff you pick up,” Cosima said. “I definitely didn’t know for sure.”

            They were quiet for a minute.

            “Must be American stuff,” Delphine said with a slight headshake.

            “I should tell her that I’m a clone,” Cosima said.

            “Really? Why? In response to that?” Delphine said.

            “A coming out party,” Cosima said with a little teasing grin and made a tiny shrug. “Just cause like there might be stuff in common. I don’t know. Just makes sense. I feel like she’d get it more, you know? Besides, it’s probably weird for Shay to be secretive about us with her at this point. Like, if she ever wants to see Sarah or Felix or anyone on my side of the family again, she has to make sure she doesn’t bring Ashley.”

            “I mean, you could pick out two sisters, but that’s it,” Delphine.

            “Yeah,” Cosima laughed.

            So Cosima had intentionally let slip that she was a clone and later brought out a picture of seven of the seestras together the last time Shay and Ashley were over for dinner towards the end of the evening. They had not talked about it afterwards. Tonight, after Ashley got their fire established, sat down on the floor, and stretched out her legs in front of the fireplace. Cody came to give her a moment of attention before wandering back to Cosima. Ashley smiled over at the two of them, thoughtful and quiet, probably thinking over things Shay had told her about Cosima and Delphine in the days since they were together last.

            Cosima felt herself noticeably more at ease with Ashley even already. Of all of the four of them, they seemed to have the least in common. Ashley grew up in the Midwest in a military family and joined the service young, like Shay. She was a physical therapist, and she met Shay at a conference about somatics and embodied experiences of trauma. And somehow Delphine and Ashley seemed to be comfortable with each other from the day they met. Delphine said she felt like she could say whatever ever she really thought to Ashley, and Ashley would be fine. The two never spoke all that much, but they seemed comfortable together. Cosima had been more worried than Delphine that Ashley would not want Shay to have a relationship with the two of them, much less want a relationship with them herself, because Shay had of course told her about how she had been sleeping with Cosima first then both of them before she and Ashley started to date. Cosima felt too much pressure to be likable and not threatening at the same time to feel at ease around Ashley. And Ashley seemed a bit inhibited with Cosima, as well, as if she already liked her but had no idea what to say about anything to her at all. They both loved Shay, and they both loved Cody. But they hadn’t made a direct connection. Now, it felt like there was one there, and the change felt a nice one to Cosima.

            Once the food was really going, Cosima managed to get Shay to give her a job. Ashley said she wanted to take Cody out, before they ate. Delphine felt she wanted to smoke and said she would go with her. They geared up with Cody standing and wagging his tail and glancing into the kitchen, wondering why Cosima and Shay were not coming with them. Delphine rubbed his ears, and he turned his head side to side in enjoyment. They headed out to walk familiar streets in the neighborhood.  

            “Things seem really good for you and Shay,” Delphine said to start some conversation with Ashley.

            “Yeah,” Ashley said, and she got shy, then almost laughed. “I took her home with me a couple weeks ago. She survived. We survived.”  

            “How was that experience?”

            “Well, she was not terrified of being thrown in the middle of military family, so that was something to see. But the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ atmosphere is still awfully thick in that house. No one has ever actually addressed the fact that their brave solider boy grew up into the professional warrior they wanted him to be, then got out of the service and quietly transformed into a radical liberal and a lesbian.”

            Delphine laughed mainly in response to Ashley’s bemused tone. Ashley was smiling and looking out at the snow, clearly remembering the visit. She shook her head a little bit.  

            “I think they are still counting it as a blessing that I’m not gay. And I am like, boy, have I got bad news for you, mom and dad… _again_. But I can’t seem to break it to them. I mean, I tell them, but it doesn’t _break_.”

            “You mean they’re just relieved you didn’t ever bring home a man? Like even now living openly as a woman?”

            “Yeah, exactly. They seemed to love Shay. They’re more comfortable with her than they are with me. Like, I don’t think they can see her as a lesbian. My mom really wanted to know if Shay ever wanted to have kids. I’ve told my mom like at least ten times that I don’t want to have kids. I guess she’s hoping Shay will change my mind or something.”

            “That’s some profoundly antiquated thinking. Nothing like a woman to turn a boy into a proper man, I suppose.”

            Ashley really laughed at this sentiment. She seemed only a little sad about her family. But she also did not seem very close to them, at least not anymore.

            “Have you taken Cosima home with you?” Ashley said.

            “I don’t go home. Not since I left for university, when I was young. There’s nothing there. I’ve met her parents. They were very sweet. They love her so deeply and genuinely, and they loved me and wanted to really know me right away. I’ve never had a welcome like that. It was a little shocking.”

            “The girls I used to date were literally nothing like Shay. They were like dark and jaded, and like maybe seemed masculine to my parents? So I think they were shocked and relieved when Shay walked in. She stood there just taking them all in silence, like, ‘Oh, okay, I get it now.’ Seems like you and Cosima really fit well.”

            “Yes, do we. But I didn’t expect her, you know? I had never imagined that I would be with a woman before.”

            Delphine realized even as she finished saying this that Ashley probably meant to say that Cosima’s parents weren’t surprised when Delphine arrived. Delphine did not think they were. But she had opened up a turn in their conversation.

            “Before what?” Ashley said.

            “Before Cosima happened,” Delphine said.

            Ashley was openly surprised to learn this.

            “Really? Wow. Did you have a queer crisis all of a sudden on meeting her?”

            “Well, things did not go smoothly for us at first, to say that least, but what was just there between the two of us was easy even from the beginning.”

            “I guess I mean just more internally. Like, did you freak out about who you thought you were?”

            “Not really. I knew enough about the science to know that this wasn’t an anomaly.”

            Ashley laughed at the sentiment. Delphine looked to see her expression. She was smiling, but she was not poking fun at Delphine. She thought the idea was strange, but she liked it because of this. Delphine smiled at her.

            “What about telling other people? Like your family and friends? Did that create a crisis?”

            “Oh, I see what you mean. No, that never happened to me. I was a misfit and a loner already,” Delphine said, and thinking this was a joke, Ashley laughed, so Delphine went on to explain. “No, seriously. At work, I did brilliantly. Outside of work, I was almost entirely alone. Surrounding when I left home for university, my original family shattered completely. Then I was a transplant from my own country, you know? Living in another language.”

            “So do you see gender and sexuality as mainly genetic?”

            “I mean, I am a scientist, so I’m predisposed to think of things as very likely genetically derived, whether or not we’ve discovered how just yet. Whatever was happening to me, whatever way you make meaning out of it, I am certain that when I met Cosima, my attraction to her was already in there. You can say that was bisexuality or a predisposition to attraction to women. But _she_ specifically was just _in there_ already. I didn’t have to question it, because how much does one actually know about one’s own biology? So incredibly little. But like, people might also say that what was happening was that, we were soul mates, you know, something that science would never explain.”

            The two of them stopped to turn around at a playground at the end of the street. Parts of the playground were cleared of snow. She took off Cody’s leash, and he went romping through the unbroken snow with a primal glee that made Delphine and Ashley both laugh. Ashley grabbed a set of monkey bars and bent her knees to hang freely. She easily went down the row, turned around, and came back. Delphine watched her with enjoyment at how free and confident she was in her body and got a cigarette lit. They gave Cody a minute to let out a furious run, and he came back of his own accord. They headed back to the others.

            “I always think that when I talk to scientists,” Ashley said, “They’ll have some really specific knowledge that explains gender and sexuality to them, and like it’s too complex for me to understand. But when I’ve really tried and listened, I think that they are still speaking in the abstract, even though they study the material world. Like you think of your sexuality as scientific, but not as a formula or something that can be seen. Not something you could study or prove without your own subjective experiences.”

            “Well, there are layers, I guess, in my thinking. Science basically is my sexuality, I think,” Delphine said, which made Ashley turn towards her in concentration, as if seeing Delphine’s expression might help her understand what she was saying. “What I mean is that, you know how you fantasize about the life you will have as an adult as a child? I thought all the time about growing up and becoming a brilliant scientist. And since I was a woman, I could not make that fit with ideas of being a wife or a mother or any of the things I think were normal for girls to fantasize about. The only relationship I ever even took in as iconic or an image of one that would be desirable for me was that of Marie and Pierre Curie.

            “My sexual relationships either paled in comparison to my relationship to my studies and career or were completely entangled in them. That was my primary identity – I was a scientist. That was what I truly desired with total confidence and clarity. All other desires felt weak in comparison, and I did not know how to long for something like Cosima. I didn’t know that a passionate and intimate relationship with someone who would easily bring energy and insight to the rest of my life was something that even existed.”

            They came inside. The four of them ate and held a lot of lighter conversation. When they were finished, they took their wine and sat around in the living room. They put the last of the wood on the fire. Ashley brought up the same question she had posed outside with Delphine to find out Cosima whether she thought that gender and sexuality were genetically derived. Cosima concentrated and became ambivalent, trying to bring precise, rich thoughts together Delphine could see.

            “Is that what they teach you in school?” Ashley asked.

            “I barely learned anything about human sexuality,” Delphine said. “Except later, at this conference that I went to. There was another woman scientist I knew only a little through some connections, and I really respected her. I went to her panel.   She was doing research on intersex expressions of sexual anatomy, and she found that she could not present her research to groups and have them understand what she was saying very well. So she got in touch with colleagues and came up with this introduction. She had this analogous question where she asked what would happen if scientists took the same approach they use in thinking about gender and sexuality and applied it to the periodic table of elements, so that any elements that comprised only a tenth of a percent of the earth’s crust just didn’t exist. And there were only something like twelve elements left. Not even carbon made the list. So like, most of reality and all biological life would be lost. So by leaving out an awareness of a small percentage of something’s true nature, we might fundamentally misunderstand the rest of it. And she got us to all focus on sexuality and intersex expression even with only a handful of studies saying it was a tiny percent of the population from the standpoint that we would fundamentally misunderstand the rest if we ignored that portion.

            “Her argument at the end was that medical science should not intervene to bring intersex sexual anatomy into alignment with preconceived notions about biological sex as a binary and that it was costly both to the people who underwent these surgeries and interventions long before they got to make choices for themselves and also for our collective understanding of what sex really is. All that resonated with me. So after that I thought that sexuality is a spectrum, you know? Cosima doesn’t like the spectrum concept, though.”

            Delphine gestured to Cosima to get her to take up the thread of thought. She could not do Cosima’s argument real justice. Cosima was nodding, and sat up with her back against the couch leg, and adjusted her glasses. She used her hands as she spoke, her eyes focused on the shape of her ideas and not her audience, showing how immersed and authentic she had become in this conversation.

            “Yeah, so sort of the emergent analogy for gender and sexuality instead of a spectrum is that of the cosmos. The reason to me is that life, by definition, wants to self-replicate but it also wants to diversify. It wants to reach out and expand into new possibilities and new realities. So like rather than imagining two static poles with people grouped around them and a handful of expressions falling in between, folks try to imagine a living, opening, continuing variation on life, right, and within life on expressions of gender and sexuality. And that, that really makes sense to me.

            “Maybe it jives with my experience more ‘cause I get to witness all these other people living my same biological experience. Yet we’re all so different. Like, maybe if we had tools good enough, those variations in all of us could be tracked back to unseen variations in our genes. But the whole point to me is that we were made as a patented product – _made_ to be the same. But life, it has a way of tending towards self-expression – not of sameness, but of variance.

            “It’s really not hard for me to see easily how something like sexual anatomy gets managed by medical science for the benefit of someone or even something other than the people who are being ‘treated,’ even though that’s how it’s always framed. Technically, even though it doesn’t show in like social markings for gender expression, I have different sexual anatomy than most females as a direct result of intentional manipulations meant to keep me from being able to procreate, because my body was all intended to be a patented. Many of my sisters died because of that genetic intervention, and I got sick and nearly died. But what’s most fascinating to me is that it didn’t work. I mean. we actively intervened to wrest control back from the corporate entity that wanted to decide our biology. It’s hard to study that. But also, my sisters Sarah and Helena, who are identical twins, their biology essentially overwrote a synthetic sequence designed to make us all infertile to express a wild type of our genetics. That’s just miraculous basically. That’s _science_ against the direct actions of scientists, which was them attempting to make copies of the same. You can’t override the innate qualities of biological life.”

            They others were quiet for a long moment, as they considered Cosima’s ideas. Delphine grew lost in memories of Cosima being ill. She wondered how you could bring something like a strategic overthrow of control over genetic possibilities into this analysis, but that seemed almost impossible. Looking at Sarah and Helena’s biology was easier. That was on the level of simple and random genetic variance.

            “I read this essay once,” Ashley said, “By a trans man named Dean Spade where he talked about all the anxieties and thoughts surrounding trans people getting surgeries and using hormones to change their own bodies. And the part that really stuck with me was that he really tried to help readers imagine a world where variation and even fluidity and nonconformity in gender expression would be celebrated – not policed or even tolerated. I could barely imagine that myself, you know? Like, I am pretty much stealth now. And I am just hoping for laws that will allow me to transition. All the costs, financial and social, I never questioned would fall totally on myself. So I think that fits with what the analogy of the cosmos is trying to get people to see and respect.”

            “I think I relate to something akin to that in a way,” Cosima said. “I never felt scared that being a clone would ruin any of my serious relationships, even though I knew some people could be really freaked out by that. I mean, like, to a pathological and violent degree. That’s because I was already a lesbian and accustomed to being around people doing the hard work of relating to what was different and new as something beautiful and exciting. I got all these sisters out of it, who shared my situation, and that was beautiful to me. But it is also true that two new people in my life became my closest friends, because they were scientists and really felt like this wasn’t just something strange and mysterious that they accepted about me, but that it was something they recognized as a potential, you know, something innately beautiful that actually drew them closer to me. It’s like, you hope that what’s different about you and potentially threatening to people unlike you at best won’t estrange you from them. Like that’s the best we usually hope to get. When the best experience in life is when what’s different about you actually draws you closer with other people. And that feels so rare and unexpected.”

            “Yes, exactly,” Ashley said. “I felt that way with Shay. Like I took forever to tell her about being trans, because I thought we would be estranged by that difference. She had this really specific idea about finding the self in the body, in embodied consent. And that was so weird to me, because I thought of my body as being mismatched to this self that was unexpressed and like up in the air, this self that never got to be real. And she got me to think of that self as really rooted in my body – a self I knew to be a part of my own embodied experiences. It’s hard to explain, but that changed things so much for me. And like I felt so glad I told her, because we got closer, and she brought me closer to myself in this crazy way.”

            “Yeah, I never knew anyone who was trans before,” Shay said, “So I had not really thought about how that would be. But like bodies are where I’m at, and that’s what we talked about even right away. You know, I am not, nor have I ever been a scientist or worked in medical sciences. Even when I studied anatomy, it was all woven up with energies and totally unscientific ways of meaning making. I’ve read some neuroscience, but it’s only to prove that the mind and body connection exists by studying PTSD and trauma by seeing the brain. To me, those experiences are real, and you don’t need a map of the brain to see them or else they’re hidden or suspect. I’m always translating what people say about biology as them a way of them talking about what’s written in the body in ways that seem deeper and more mysterious to me than genetics, although you two have made genetics seem much deeper and more mysterious than they ever did to me before. But like, when people talk about the biology of self-expression and are willing to question whether a person’s biology should be allowed to express itself or altered with medical interventions, then I can see clearly how you cannot talk about the ethics of all this without talking about consent, which is not science. You’re in my sphere, talking about how to create embodied consent, the place where that person has a powerful, cultivated sense of what they want. Not like, consent as a coerced legal agreement.”

            “You had actually found out all these skills to repair the damage that’s done to people’s consent by social control and trauma, when we met,” Ashley said to Shay. “I believed easily enough that oppression was a lived, embodied experience, like a material thing and not just some abstract idea. I didn’t think you could do anything about that. I thought it made it _harder_ to work with, because changing ideas and doing talk therapy weren’t potent enough. But, generative somatics, it’s like a method for awakening this whole emotional immune system, and the body will work with and for you in these deep, altering ways. “

            “I think you’ve taught us to respect that work, as well. It’s like you always say, Shay,” Delphine said. “There’s no actual mind – body split. That’s an idea. But those are just frameworks for seeing part of what’s real. What’s real is intertwined and more complex than any idea we have in our minds.”

            “Honestly, I think that scientists forget to be genuine in scientific rationality, because it means being so deeply humble,” Cosima said. “The whole point of scientific inquiry is to discover all these small threads of truth in a vast reality of what we really just do not know. Once we forget that and think there’s nothing more to discover or we will have all of it soon, we’re really prone to biologism.”

            “That’s like too much faith in biology?” Shay said.

            “Yeah, kind of, or like using biological explanations for understanding social situations. So, you know, like, people who will make these seemingly rational arguments that we know that men rape women on a pandemic scale, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The reasoning given is because men are innately predatory and women are innately fragile. So you take a whole system of power that evolved in a particular historical context that’s very much something that was not inevitable and could be changed, and you make it seem like there’s this hard, fast line tied to our biology. When in reality, there’s absolutely nothing biologically derived about half our population having a sense of self that’s based on the fantasy of being innately unlike to and superior to the other half, a sense of self they try to maintain through all these forms of domination and violence. There are other ways of being human and relating to one another accessible to us right now, with no biological evolutionary process necessary. Like, what you were saying before, we could have a world where expressions of gender and sexuality were celebrated rather than policed – where people would look to that possibility and emergent forms of life as a place of wonder and hope even.”

            They were quiet for another minute. Cosima adjusted herself. She had all this energy in her body from the charge in her thoughts. Delphine grew overwhelmed with a feeling of love for her and did not hide it.

            “You are such a nerd,” Delphine said in a soft voice that conveyed both her reverence and admiration for Cosima.

            Shay and Ashley laughed at the two of them, as Delphine leaned over and brought her hand to Cosima’s face to kiss her cheek, while Cosima grinned and became very nearly coy.

            “I don’t know how I got here,” Ashley said, “But I was just saying to Shay recently that you can literally _feel_ the difference when someone wants to know about your sexuality or even like this nosy stuff about your anatomy or your sex life because they want to know you better and when they’re asking like _for_ themselves. I used to think it was like innate curiosity, but it feels weirder than that to me.”

            “Shittier, you mean,” Shay said.

            “If you fall outside of what people think are the boundaries that define their reality,” Delphine said, “You represent a truth that’s a threat to their sense of self. So they’re scared of you, but also interested in interpreting you in a way that’s meant to create a sense of ease again and shore up that threatened sense of who they are. That has nothing to do with you, really. It’s all an internal dynamic for them, but they bring you into it. It’s obvious sometimes, but it can also be subtle. I once had a couple at a conference spend probably fifteen minutes trying to get me to say that I was ‘bisexual,’ and I don’t know why I wouldn’t agree. ‘Cause like, you know, who cares about that? That’s fine. But they were so uncomfortable that I would not agree that definition fit me, it was like I was being crazy or even like, ‘Stand and deliver – you owe us this,’ if you know what I mean.”  

           The other three seemed to remember comparable experiences and agreed with Delphine.

            “I swear to God,” Ashley said, “If I have to deal with one more unprovoked question about how Shay and I have sex, I’m just going to start handing out Bibles and be like, ‘Y’all need Jesus first, not just pamphlets on diversity.’”

            “Guh!” Cosima said, “Why are people so lacking in sexual imagination?” clearly deeply upset with this thought. “Seriously! Like, they act like that’s just benign, inborn curiosity. But if you _had_ curiosity about sex normally, you’d go find some information and already have something to bring to the table in this moment. I’ve had that question before just as a cis lesbian, like, ‘How do two women have sex?’ and I am just… not even offended… but… _concerned_ when people ask me that. Like, how do _you_ have sex? And why doesn’t it involve a brain and a voice and an _entire_ body?”

            “Sex is elementary, Cosima,” Delphine teased in a bland tone, “Round pegs in round holes. What is all this complicated nonsense?”

            “You better start asking some adults some questions,” Cosima retorted and sustained the joke, “‘Cause you’re old enough to learn how actual people can have many different kinds of sex that are all equally enjoyable in like the freaking seventh grade.”

            Their conversation turned lighter after that. They finished their wine, and Ashley and Shay asked if they could help clean up. Cosima and Delphine said they would see to it in the morning, and they ushered them off home instead. They saw them out, and Delphine came back to where she had been sitting. Cosima stirred up the last of their fire. She sat back where she was on the floor to be closer to the fire but also moved up closer to where Delphine could reach her.

            “Ashley is sweet,” Cosima said and sat thinking to herself for a moment. She added in a murmur, “She’s also really hot.”

            Delphine could not help but laugh out loud at this. Cosima turned her face up and to the side to give Delphine a coy grin. Delphine shook her head artificially. She leaned forward and brought her hand to Cosima’s face.

            “What are you about to get me into?” Delphine teased lightly.

            Cosima raised her eyebrows a bit and made a half a shrug as if to say, “Nothing at all.” Delphine kissed Cosima on the cheek a second time that evening, as she felt her entire chest aching with love for Cosima and the way she existed in the world. She whispered with her mouth close to Cosima’s skin, “Always looking for the possibilities.”

            Cosima was smiling and had her eyes closed when Delphine leaned back to see her face. She was blushing very slightly, and Delphine saw it on her cheekbones and her collarbones. She sight of Cosima’s skin when flushed gave Delphine a number of ideas all at once. And Cosima read that shift in her energy and sat up. She turned around to kneel in front of Delphine.

            All of Cosima’s focus settled on Delphine’s body. Delphine could feel the sexual tension rise up in Cosima, vivid and potent, in the subtlest shifts that could be felt as much as seen. Delphine felt her own body become full and heavy in response. Cosima looked over Delphine as she decided what to do. She ran her hands down the smooth fabric of the black pants Delphine was wearing. Cosima’s jaw muscles were tensing, as her hands came to very gently lift the edge of Delphine’s sweater to undo the belt she wore. As Cosima’s fingertips grazed the bare skin low on Delphine’s stomach, Delphine felt her eyes nearly close with how vivid and weighted even those frailest touches felt inside her body.

            Delphine sank down into the couch, as Cosima dragged off her pants and her underwear with them. Cosima leaned down to draw Delphine’s legs open and kiss the inside of her thigh. Cosima was still wearing all of her clothes and jewelry, so her hands rested on Delphine’s body almost still. Somehow those few points of contact between their bodies could be clearly felt moving through Delphine’s entire body. As Cosima’s mouth moved up Delphine’s leg, the edge of her glasses nudged against Delphine’s skin. Delphine reached to remove Cosima’s glasses and held them dangling from the fingers of one hand, as she held onto Cosima’s shoulders. And Cosima went on her way uninterrupted to press her mouth to Delphine’s body.

            When Delphine got enough room in her mind, she put Cosima’s glasses on the side table with what little bit of care she could manage.   Delphine’s hands moved over Cosima’s shoulders the back of her neck, touching her almost hard, matching with the shape and tension held in her body easily, without hurting her and without thinking through any of this. With the rest of her clothes still on, Delphine could feel distinctly how hard her own heart was beating, as her bra and sweater were lightly pressing against her ribs. She would not have noticed this were it not for the strange mix of familiar sensations that came with being half clothed during sex, and the suddenness and intensity of her body’s response filled her with a sense of wonder. In only moments, Cosima had turned and brought Delphine into the most profound depths of an erotic experience. Delphine recognized how readily she has been swept up in this, how easy it was for her to trust Cosima, how certain she felt that she would follow Cosima absolutely anywhere Cosima wanted to take her.

            This ease between the two of them, the way Cosima could follow her up into the highest reaches of abstract thought, then bring her down out of her head and into her body, by the sheer gravity held in the presence of Cosima’s own body near her astonished Delphine utterly. Whatever was inscribed inside Delphine’s body on the deepest level, whether biology or soul or something yet unnamed, rushed to meet Cosima every time she came near. And Delphine had never experienced anything like this before, any connection with another person that brought her more into herself and stayed with her through so many states of being.

            Even as almost sharp waves of satisfaction sent Delphine pressing herself back into the couch, an unmet desire began to coalesce inside of her. When it finally grew so strong that it overcame what else she was feeling, she leaned forward. She nearly struggled to get words to form in her mouth with so much of her mind overcome by passion. 

            “Cosima,” Delphine managed, “Laisse-moi sentir ta peau.” Her words meant, “Let me feel your skin.”

            The sound of Delphine’s voice affected Cosima with the gravity of the longing her voice carried. Cosima leaned up at once and reached behind her to get the zipper down on her dress. Delphine removed her own sweater, almost too shaken to manage the simple act. Cosima stripped herself out of her tights as fast as she could, then she helped take Delphine’s bra away and drew their bodies close. They held onto one another a moment, and Cosima then kissed Delphine’s naked shoulders. As Delphine sank back involuntarily, Cosima’s mouth went to her throat, her chest, anyplace she could manage.  

            The pull of Cosima’s naked body dragged Delphine back up. Their arms wove through one another’s in between the two of them, as they touched one another’s chests. They kissed in a way that Delphine had never kissed with anyone else, a furious passion that somehow matched up well enough to remain graceful no matter the urgency or the depth their kisses held. When Cosima’s hand went between Delphine’s legs, Delphine could not help but reach to touch Cosima, as well. She felt Cosima’s body raise up with the intensity of the feel, and Delphine marveled when she felt Cosima’s body beginning to shake from some deep place, even with Cosima still as far from climax as Delphine knew she was.

            Eventually Cosima dragged Delphine off the couch. They ended up on the floor. The hardwood could not hurt Delphine’s bare knees. The entire world converged to what felt a confined sphere around the two of them, infinity brought down to occupy only the space of this interconnection they were experiencing. If the room was cool, the floor hard, the carpet rough when they lay down on it, none of that held any of the weight it would have during ordinary reality. Everything became altered by the heat, the fluidity, the softness, and the strength of their own two bodies moving with each other. They kept on with the valiance known only to the most intimate of lovers, until all of their being and not merely their bodies became utterly saturated and they became fully exhausted.  

            As they lay on their backs beside one another on the floor, Delphine studied the shape of Cosima’s hand touching her own. She could smell again the sharp spice of wood smoke from the last remains of the fire burning over their heads. She felt the lines of her shoulder blades pressing distinctly into the floor, and the hard surface beginning at last to resonate in her body. She dragged herself up and got Cosima to follow her up to their bed, leaving everything else behind, scattered through the living room, to find the following morning.

            As Delphine faded into sleep, her chest and face pressed now into the soft surface of their bed, with Cosima’s warm body sprawled halfway over her own, she reached back over her shoulder to touch Cosima’s face. Even nearly asleep, Delphine felt Cosima make the slightest nudge of encouragement in response to her touch. The slightest smile formed at the corners of Delphine’s mouth. Cosima had arrived completely unexpected and broke open her world of science to make all of life a place where she could find that same sense of wonder and live by that same spirit of discovery that she loved so much. Delphine had never really wanted to be loved before this. But then, she had never known that any love could match and call out who she was so deeply as Cosima’s.

**Author's Note:**

> References for the ideas expressed in this story:
> 
> Here are some places where you can read about some of the ideas expressed in this story. Folks are definitely welcome to add to this list and put ideas in the comments thread! 
> 
> Delphine’s story about the colleague who introduced her work is based on something I found on Tumblr that a teacher had made that I thought was beautiful and her work on that of Dr. Elizabeth Reis, a contemporary women’s studies professor and researcher. Here is a link to the Tumblr link that works as I am posting this: 
> 
> http://yesbothways.tumblr.com/post/151908168129/10oclockdot-saying-that-man-and-woman-are-the#notes
> 
> Ashley quotes Dean Spade’s essay “Mutilating Gender” which you can read online  
> Here is a link that works as I am posting this: 
> 
> http://www.makezine.enoughenough.org/mutilate.html
> 
> Shay’s ideas about embodied consent come from the theory of generative somatics, which I learned about in the book Healing Sex by Staci Haines and radical approaches to creating social justice by looking to the body as the site of intervention in oppression like the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Empowerment and a World without Rape. One of my primaries recently read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In The Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk which seemed very much related. 
> 
> Cosima’s ideas about using the cosmos as an analogy for gender and sexual expression is floating around in the LGBTQI+ community, and I don’t know where it originated. I basically captured my own experience of being ignited by this idea after studying capitalism and food justice and ecology for a while and used the clones as a parallel analogy for the ecological principle being expressed. That principle of self-replication and self-derivation in the living, organic world is what’s being eroded by capitalism not only in more observed forms like our animals but in our plants and microorganisms necessary for sustainable agriculture that will literally result in a species level suicide for humanity. I think that Vandana Shiva’s work helped me understand this the best, along with the documentary Symphonies of the Soil and permaculture concepts like Bill Mollison’s (even if he is pretty overtly sexist). You can find this stuff online. Vandana Shiva has lots of youtube videos.
> 
> Everything I know about being a woman who loves women is founded on the ideas of black feminists including bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Without them, I would barely know how to be human in any meaningful way. I would specifically suggest the love trilogy by bell hooks, the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and the essay “The Erotic As Power” in the collection of essays Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde as starting places.


End file.
